This May Be Even Better Than Yesterday's Music One

Photo Finish Friday

He fought the law and the law won.

Homeboy about to be disappeared in Panama City

One thing I noticed right away in Panama was the police presence. Some wore blue uniforms like regular cops, some wore green uniforms that looked like army uniforms, and these guys wore black. I asked Guido (pronounced Gee-do, rhymes with Speedo, you Jersey Shore watching people), our guide, and he said these guys in black were roughly equivalent to the Secret Service in the USA, as we were in a market just down the street from the presidential mansion.

The story behind this picture is we were meandering around the square, checking things out. I was right next to two of these officers when two Indian women, from a booth like this one, ran up to them, pointing and screeching wildly. The cops took off at a run and soon collared this dude. Of course I was in hot pursuit, laughing at danger every step of the way. Apparently this guy had stolen from the Indians and made a break for it. He didn't get far. I'm thinking next door to El Presidente's crib probably isn't the smartest place to take a stab at petty theft.

It was quite dramatic as we loitered near and watched the proceedings. At one time there were probably eight or so officers around him. Ultimately they loaded him in this truck and whisked him away. The perp looked . . . troubled. I commented to Julia that "fighting the power" is all well and good until "the power" shows up in fatigues packing assault rifles and freakin' baseball bats.

The cops around Panama were usually in pairs, mostly in small pickups and on motorcycles. At least one of them always had an assault rifle or shotgun. We saw them everywhere, and we also passed through at least two sections where they were stopping traffic and checking drivers' papers. I asked Guido about the police presence and why they were so heavily armed. He said back in '89 when the US invaded Panama to oust Noriega (another one of our glorious military actions -- Operation Just Cause -- in the name of "democracy" and other things), he armed the citizenry and beseeched them to rise up in his defense. In the aftermath all of those guns ended up in the hands of people who you probably don't want heavily armed. In addition, many police and military people found themselves unemployed, and the city saw a boom in private security. All that brings us to today, where the authorities find themselves facing criminals with impressive weaponry.



Photo Finish Friday is the brainchild of writer/blogger Leah J. Utas.

Heartbreaking

Funny, yeah. But still . . . heartbreaking.


There are still good musicians out there. Mainstream listeners just don't care about them.

On This Date in 1940

Woody Guthrie wrote this song 71 years ago today.




It may seem kind of hokey to many people now, but the sentiment is important to remember, especially the way things are going these days. There are many sons-a-bitches in the USA that need a firm reminder stuffed right up in their pieholes.

28 Hours Later

I had occasion this morning to drive right by where I took my Photo Finish Friday shot yesterday, and given today was bright and sunny I thought I'd take a couple more shots. So here are images using the polaroid camera from my Retro Camera App I downloaded to my phone, from essentially the same spot as yesterday morning.

Here's a shot using the regular camera the phone has.

Looks okay, but I think the image quality looks better retro, at least in trying to present an interesting image. If I wanted a crisp image, I'd use my "real" camera, because this straight-up shot from the cell phone just doesn't do it for me. People who say cell phones are going to make digital cameras obsolete obviously don't care about good pictures. Even my small, inexpensive point-and-shoot crushes this for quality.

When I grow up I want a pro camera. Maybe I should knock off a gas station or something.

Photo Finish Friday

I've been playing around with this ap I downloaded onto my phone that makes the camera shoot pictures with various "vintage camera" options. This morning around 7:30 AM on a gray, cloudy day I drove up onto the South Hills area to take this shot with the phone:

This is obviously the polaroid option, in color. I think there are about five different camera types, and this one turned out the best. I like it because in the dim background you can just make out the ghost outlines of the hills to the north. As always, click the image to make it bigger.

It's funny. Here we are in an age when digital cameras make it easy for just about anyone to take excellent, sharp images . . . and I find myself liking more and more the rougher, old-looking stuff. Anyway, here's the black & white version, which is also pretty cool:

For interested Missoula folks, this was taken from Artemos Drive, looking kind of NE with Higgins Ave angling kind of from the center of the frame slightly diagonal to the left.




Photo Finish Friday is the brainchild of writer/blogger Leah J. Utas.

The Latest from DonkeyGirl

New stuff up at DonkeyGirl's Etsy page -- Party Dresses! Make sure and check them out. I particularly like the Bettie Dress. I totally think Christa Faust should be rocking this thing at Bouchercon 2011 in St. Louis.

I mean really, can't you totally see her in it when she's up for an Edgar for her forthcoming novel, Choke Hold?

Christa pictured here with Noir Czar Eddie Muller

Meanwhile, Julia's hard at work on her Spring 2011 collection, coming soon!

Very cool. She continues to be an inspiration.

¡Diablos Rojo!

When we first arrived in Panama City, by the time we got our customs stuff sorted out, our luggage, and were finally picked up, it was dark. Guido, our guide, took us to dinner, then the plan was to return to the airport to pick up another guy who was arriving to join a group of students from the University of Southern Illinois who were also staying at the lodge in Gamboa (the town we were staying in, north of Panama City).

It was a surreal ride, being in this strange, unknown place, and the airport isn't exactly near downtown Panama City. We were driving this road, in all the crazy traffic (Panamanian drivers are nuts!), and along the sides of the streets were a combination of ramshackle buildings and open markets thronged with people. The lights in these markets were dim, and the smoke and smells of cooking food were heavy in the air. Music was blasting from the markets and from other cars. It seemed so unhinged, and slightly dangerous . . . and I wanted to stop and jump right in the middle of it.

Suddenly this bus, essentially a renovated school bus, loomed up -- bright with all these wild lights, and painted up crazily. We saw several of them. Guido told us the are called "Red Devils." As I understood it, these buses offer the bulk of the public transportation, but were about to be put out of business by state-owned buses due to their being somewhat unreliable, and even dangerous. I thought they were awesome.

They were all over Panama; we saw them everywhere we went. Of course there were far more in Panama City (1/3 of the entire population of the country lives in Panama City) but we'd even see them out in the countryside. Some were fairly plain looking, but most were garishly painted in a way that the most gawdawful conversion van could only dream of. This one was in the mountain town of El Valle, which sits in the caldera of an extinct volcano, hauling people from one end of the town to the other, back and forth. Think about it now, I wish we'd taken a ride just for the hell of it!

Someone in our group -- I think it was John -- wondered aloud if the people who own these buses treat them like tattoos; as the money is available, new art gets added, or more lights, or bigger and louder tailpipes. There were just so many, and so wild in appearance!

I wasn't able to take all the pictures I'd have liked to, and most of the ones I took from inside our van didn't turn out. If I had the time and money, I'd love to go back and shoot a coffee table book's worth of images. They were a lively and interesting part of the experience of touring around Panama. It's sad to think that by the time I make it back they may no longer being roaring down the roads.

Oh, Canada

Our "friends" to the north may be the conduit that leads to our destruction, but this alone gives them a pass.

Blame it on those Stinkin' Kids

Saw this bit on Vagabondish that links to this article: Survey Reveals Business Travelers Want Adult Only Flights.

Could adult only flights become a possibility in the future? If business travelers get their way it could. That's because a recent poll revealed business class passengers would use a major airline that offered flights minus children on board.

There are few things worse than a screaming kid on a flight, I get that. On our return trip from Panama, on the LA to Salt Lake connection, I scored an upgrade to First Class. Being the chivalrous man that I am, I let Julia take it. Which I regretted, because the row ahead of me included a fractious child who pretty much howled and squirmed the whole way. Going back a trip before that, on my return from Milwaukee in January I was wedged into the window seat next to a young couple with a baby. The kid wasn't noisy at all, but smelled like babies smell. And I don't like that smell, I won't deny it. But hey, I survived, no big deal. I'm an adult, I realize that things aren't always going to be about me, you know?

There are things much more aggravating than that on flights, believe me. The dude who jacks his seat all the way back into my lap at first opportunity. THAT enrages me. Or the loudmouths who carry on a loud conversation all the way from Minneapolis to Houston as if everyone wants to hear their jibber jabber. That annoys me more than kids, hands down. Or those assholes who ignore the flight attendant's request to just put one bag in the overhead and keep their coats and other bags on the floor in front of them, and proceed to fill an entire section of bins with their shit (roll-away, briefcase, overcoat and hat) before sitting down. Rude bastards.

This line is the kicker, though:

Nearly 18% of business travelers were bothered by the complimentary upgrades some economy class passengers received.

Hey, you 18%ers? Go fuck yourselves. May the next flight you're on, and every one thereafter, be marred by a kid shitting its pants in the seat right next to you.

Now That's Romance

Courtesy of one of my favorite artists, the always awesome Glen Orbik.

Don't worry, kids. I'm sure this couple is married.

TERMINAL DAMAGE by the Do Some Damage crew (Book Review)

I was late to the party when it comes to reading eBooks. Didn't see how I'd ever possibly be able to get on board. Then my mom bought me a Barnes & Noble Nook, and I ordered up a couple books. Actually enjoyed reading them. Now I have half-a-dozen or so waiting in queue to be read, right along with the 100+ of physical books I have that I need to get read. It goes on.

Still, not having a Kindle, I figured those releases that were Kindle-only wouldn't ever cross my radar. Until I got this fancy Samsung Fascinate smart phone that has a Kindle ap on it. No way I could ever read anything on a freakin' phone, though, right?

Wrong.

Releases like this collection from the fine folks at Do Some Damage are perfect. This is the second collection I've read exclusively on my phone (this one was the first), and I find it to be perfect. I don't slouch into an overstuffed chair to dig in like I would with a regular book (or even with my Nook, for that matter), but often enough I find myself in situations where I have some time and don't have anything with me to read. Out comes the phone, and I can read a story or two while waiting for whatever it is I'm waiting for. At the DMV. At the Jiffy Lube. Waiting for my kid after school. Hell, I finished this one lingering an extra 20 minutes in bed this morning.

What about the stories in Terminal Damage? Excellent, of course, which is to be expected. About half of these folks are already published authors, and the others have the ripe scent of inevitability all over their prose. The styles are as varied as the personalities of the writers, all touching on the airport theme that runs throughout. You want humor? Charbonneau brings it. Tough guy bustin' people up? Weddle's your man. Biker dudes expanding their criminal enterprise? You knew John McFetridge would deliver.

So yeah, if you haven't bought this already, do it. Get in on the ground floor so you can brag about how you were reading these cats before everyone else was.

Photo Finish Friday

Here is another case of an image not doing a scene justice.

This is a waterfall we frolicked under in Panama. The angle here is deceptive, as the whole thing was probably twenty or thirty feet tall. We had taken a dugout canoe about an hour up the Rio Changres to visit an Embera Indian village. On the return, we took the canoe up a little tributary as far as we could, then walked in the rest of the way. Coming around a corner, crawling over some rocks, we saw this.

It was a big pool of cool water. After being out in the sun, the water felt divine. We swam around in the pool, then swam up and wallowed right at the base of the falls. It was fantastic, one of the best stretches of twenty minutes over the entire trip.

Blame it on the Jungle

Beyond the mindblowing experience of getting to soak up the natural beauty of Panama, one thing I really loved about the trip was the luxury of being unplugged. No phone calls, no email, no social media, none of that for the entire ten days. No news of the outside world, nothing. Julia's dad, John, had his laptop, and his allowing Sid to use it in the evening to communicate with his girlfriend no doubt helped the little fella survive the trip, but I never checked anything. It was glorious. On the return, when we landed in Los Angeles, I almost felt nauseous when I was about to turn my cell phone on to call my folks and update them on our status, because I knew as soon as I did all the voice mails and emails and text messages and all that stuff that had accumulated would come flooding in.

Thing is, after boiling down over a thousand emails (the vast majority of which was spam) spread out over a couple personal accounts, plus work, there really wasn't anything important that I'd missed. Not to mention all the Google feeds I just deleted unchecked (probably 90% of them, after cherrypicking from the ones I truly enjoy reading every day). Besides a few project-related work emails, of all the stuff that came across there were a grand total of three messages that I really cared about, and even those were only of mild interest, and wouldn't have had any real big ramifications if I'd just ignored them.

Clearly, given the amount of time I spend with the electronic world, I'm putting way too much importance in it. That, and I realized I really don't have much going on in my private life that is particularly relevant to the rest of the world. Which is why I haven't blogged about the trip, even though I'm bursting with stuff to talk about. I'd rather sit in a coffee shop or at a bar with the dozen or so people who read this blog, face to face, than blog it. That isn't going to happen, obviously, so eventually I'll throw out a couple posts here and there. But damn, for all the "good" that's touted about this social media thing, it really is pretty damn superfluous. Even as I say that I'm aware that I've met some great people via the online world, but I think it's important that we all just step the hell away from it all a bit more frequently.

Getting outside, man, doing things, that's where it's at. Sitting at a computer just can't compete. In Panama, I even spent a couple evenings by myself, after everyone else had retired to their rooms, sitting at the table on the porch where we always convened, jotting stuff in my notebook, or even just sitting and listening to the night sounds of the jungle (mostly bugs and night birds). If I close my eyes, I can almost imagine it right now. Looking at the pictures, or daydreaming about it, it's hard to believe we were actually there at all.

So it probably comes as no surprise that after being back for about a week-and-a-half now it's been a real struggle getting back into the daily groove. I know I risk sounding like a whiner, which I hate, but everything: work, writing, even exercise -- to say nothing of the trials and tribulations of domestic life (paying bills, returning calls, et al) -- has been pretty damn tedious. It was great to get away, and so difficult to come back.

To use a real stretch of a metaphor (and you'll note that I just unleashed a horrible pun too!), think of the gate on a wire fence. I don't know how many of you people grew up in environments where one was faced often with closing a gate on a very tight fence, but more and more making ends meet has been just like that; cussing and sweating and swearing while leaning against a post in hopes you can just squeeze it under the wire that holds the whole thing together. Sometimes it's fine, but often that post just won't get under the goddamn loop no matter how much elbow grease you put to it. The desire then is just to say fuck it and drop the gate on the ground and drive over it a couple times, but then all the freakin' livestock will probably get out and everyone knows what a trial rounding them back up again can be.

Livestock. It's enough to make me want to go full-on vegetarian. Problem is I find most vegetarian fare to be perfectly fine . . . as a side dish to a big piece of meat, that is.

For all the post-vacation existential angst, I'd do it again in a heartbeat. And will do another trip like this again, just as soon as possible. Meanwhile, I've uploaded a bunch of pictures from the trip. You can view a slideshow of them RIGHT HERE. If you click the Show Info in the upper right corner (as indicated in red in the following picture) it will give you a brief description of what the picture is. Hope you dig them. Just know they don't come close to capturing what it was like to be there, though. Pictures almost never do.

Photo Finish Friday

Street cat chillin' in Panama City.



Photo Finish Friday is the brainchild of writer/blogger Leah J. Utas.

Back in the USA

This post is a couple days late, as we did make it back from Panama on Monday. It was everything we'd hoped for; the trip was great, and there will be more to come, but as of now there are a ton of loose ends we are trying to get tied up. Meanwhile, here are just a handful of pictures. . . .